Dr. Hülsmann offers his concluding thoughts on his debate with Philipp Bagus regarding the monetary consequences of closing the central bank of Argentina.

It is erroneous to think that shutting down the central bank would exacerbate price-inflation or even entail a hyperinflation.

It was claimed closing Argentina’s central bank would exacerbate inflationary tendencies, however, there are flaws in this reasoning.

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

The Misesian (TM): The economics behind gift giving and charity have long been a neglected topic among researchers and economists. What prompted you to launch your own investigation into the topic?Jörg Guido Hülsmann (JGH): The economic literature on gifts is actually quite massive, but it’s true that these writings don’t make it into standard micro- and macroeconomics. My initial interest was sparked by Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical letter Caritas in veritate. The pope wondered how the scope of gratuitous goods could be increased in the human economy, and he called on all people of good will to deal with this issue in thought and action. I put a doctoral student to work on this subject in 2011 and she successfully defended her French-language dissertation four years later. Still I sensed

Human action is usually driven by the desire to obtain more for less, and, ideally somethingfor nothing. This has sometimes been called the economic principle. The wish to “get freestuff” pervades all times and places, all sectors of the economy, all ages, and all socialbackgrounds. The very selfishness for which the market economy is often chided is, atbottom, a universal quest to obtain goods for free. Jörg Guido Hülsmann sets out to explorethe boundaries of this endeavor. He investigates the nature, forms, causes, and consequencesof gratuitous goods and concludes that they thrive within a free economy. But generosity andgratuitous abundance tend to be undermined and reversed by central banking and the welfarestate.

The Misesian (TM): Die wirtschaftlichen Mechanismen des Schenkens und der Wohltätigkeit waren lange Zeit ein vernachlässigtes Thema in der volkswirtschaftlichen Lehre und Forschung. Was hat Ihre Untersuchung zu diesem Thema veranlasst?

The Misesian (TM): The economics behind gift giving and charity have long been a neglected topic among researchers and economists. What prompted you to launch your own investigation into the topic?
Jörg Guido Hülsmann (JGH): The economic literature on gifts is actually quite massive, but it’s true that these writings don’t make it into standard micro- and macroeconomics. My initial interest was sparked by Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical letter Caritas in veritate. The pope wondered how the scope of gratuitous goods could be increased in the human economy, and he called on all people of good will to deal with this issue in thought and action. I put a doctoral student to work on this subject in 2011 and she successfully defended her French-language dissertation four years later. Still I

Recorded at the Mises Institute Supporters Summit in Auburn, Alabama, 12-14 October 2023.
Download the slides from this lecture at Mises.org/SS23_PPT_10

Recorded at the Mises Institute Supporters Summit in Auburn, Alabama, 14 October 2023. Includes an introduction by Dr. Sandra Klein and audience question and answer period.
Sponsored by Gregory and Joy Morin.

The Cultural Impact of the Dollar | Guido Hülsmann

Video of The Cultural Impact of the Dollar | Guido Hülsmann

In 1990, socialism seemed to be done once and for all, but the times have changed. In the last twenty years, socialism has again become fashionable beyond the academic fringes. The covid-19 crisis demonstrated how quickly and thoroughly the traditionally free societies of the West may be transformed by small groups of determined and well-coordinated decisionmakers. Top-down central planning of all aspects of human life is today not merely a theoretical possibility. It seems to be right around the corner.
Now, the renaissance of central planning is an intellectual and practical dead end, for the reasons that Ludwig von Mises explained one hundred years ago. But if Mises was right, then how can we explain the renaissance of socialism as a political ideal? To some extent, this might be

When it comes to matters of money and banking, all practical political issues ultimately hinge on one central question: can one improve or deteriorate the state of an economy by increasing or decreasing the quantity of money?1
Aristotle said that money was no part of the wealth of a nation because it was simply a medium of exchange in inter-regional trade, and the authority of his opinion thoroughly marked medieval thought on money. Scholastic scholars therefore spent no time enquiring about the benefits that changes of the money supply could have for the economy. The relevant issue in their eyes was the legitimacy of debasements, because they saw that this was an important issue of distributive justice.2 And after the birth of economic science in the 18th century, the classical economists

[This article is excerpted from chapter 21 of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.]
In the early 1950s, Mises’s NYU seminar dealt increasingly with epistemological questions. As he said to Ludwig Lachmann, he felt that the analysis of epistemological problems would be the number one task in the social sciences in the coming years.

[unable to retrieve full-text content][Chapter 11 of The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2003), pp. 369–413.]
Few people object to the private production of shoes or rock concerts.

The essential fallacy of John Maynard Keynes and his early disciples was to cultivate the monetary equivalent of alchemy. They believed that paper money was a suitable means to alleviate the fundamental economic problem of scarcity. The printing press was, at any rate, under certain plausible conditions of duress, a substitute for hard work, savings, and cutting prices (Hazlitt 1959, 1960).

Our global system of fiat moneys favors spenders and borrowers over savers. Low—and moderate—income households who wish to save for the future are at the greatest disadvantage, and this has led to profound cultural changes over the past century, writes Guido Hülsmann.This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Keith Hocker.